Son Sen

Son Sen (12 June 1930-15 June 1997) was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1974 to 1992 and Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. He and his family were purged and murdered on the orders of Pol Pot in 1997.

Biography
Son Sen was born in Tra Vinh Province, French Indochina in 1930, and he was of Chinese and Vietnamese ancestry. While studying in Paris in 1950, he joined a circle of Cambodian Marxist students who were influenced by radicals within the French Communist Party, and his mediocre grades and his political involvement led to the authorities pulling his scholarship in 1956. He became a teacher back in Cambodia, but he had also become a member of the clandestine Communist Party of Kampuchea by 1960. In 1962, he was removed from his teaching position due to his anti-Sangkum ideals, and he went underground in 1964 and joined the Khmer Rouge guerrillas who were in opposition to Norodom Sihanouk's government. By the late 1960s, he had become an experienced guerrilla commander and a high-ranking CPK official, and he took part in several successful uprisings in the southwest of the country in 1968. In 1970, he became commander of the GRUNK's northeastern zone during the Cambodian Civil War, and he became Chief of Staff of the Khmer Rouge forces in 1972. His devotion to Pol Pot and his belonging to the CPK's centrist faction led to him rising in the ranks, and he served as Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 to 1979. He was responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people in the last months of 1978 during the Cambodian Genocide in eastern Cambodia. Sen continued to lead Khmer Rouge forces after the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, waging a guerrilla war from the Cardamom Mountains. In 1991, he worked towards the reintegration of the Khmer Rouge into normal national politics, but he had little influence from 1992 to 1997. After Son Sen was rumored to be negotiating a surrender to Hun Sen, Pol Pot had Son Sen and 13 of his family members murdered in Anlong Veng in 1997.